AutoCAD Exchange

January 25, 2011

In The Box: OOPS

Today's featured command is OOPS and was recommended by Without a Net readers, Richard Woollacott and Todd Rogers.

The OOPS command has been around for a very long time but I couldn't nail down exactly how long so I asked dave espinosa-aguilar if he knew. He dug through his old AutoCAD manuals and found a reference to it in his 1.4 (AutoCAD-86) manual so it's a least been around that long and probably longer:

In the same way that LAYERP is a like a targeted undo for recent changes to layer settings, OOPS is an undo for the last set of objects you erased. Whereas UNDO undoes operations you've performed (in reverse sequence), with OOPS you can erase something, do several other operations and then issue the OOPS command, and the erased objects will be restored without affecting the other stuff you did in between.

OOPS is a good for when you realize, several commands later, that you actually shouldn't have erased that set of objects a few commands ago. That's the beauty of OOPS: you can have 200 commands between now and the time you last erased something and OOPS will bring it back. Before there was an option to retain objects when creating a block, OOPS was ideal for getting your objects back after they were turned into a block.

There are a couple things to know about OOPS:

OOPS is only good for one resurrection at a time. Unlike UNDO, there is no stack for OOPS; once you restore the last set of erased objects the OOPS command will have no affect until after something else has been erased.

You can't use OOPS to restore an object whose layer has since been purged.

It is somewhat common that using the UNDO command can affect OOPS; not too surprising considering what those commands do. Your mileage may vary.

I know that OOPS is old hat for many of you but I expect there are new AutoCAD users for whom OOPS is brand new and shiny.

Thanks to Richard and Todd for the suggestion and dave e-a for the historical research.